To Maggie O'Farrell (Coleraine, Northern Ireland, 1972) the story of her latest book came "like a lightning bolt." It all started when she reread one of her favorite poems, My Last Duchess by Robert Browning, frequently heard in UK schools, despite the protagonist confessing to the murder of his previous wife. "I wondered if he was a real character," the writer says. Then she discovered that he had indeed existed and, even worse, that she was a 16-year-old girl. That first spark led her to find the portrait of Lucrezia de'Medici, surprising her again with her expression, unusual for Renaissance Italy: "She looks with longing, a little worried. I saw that she had a story to tell."
Thus began to forge The Marriage Portrait, published by Libros del Asteroide (L'Altra Editorial in Catalan), where she travels to the 16th century to put herself in the shoes of the young Lucrezia, warning the reader from the beginning that she is going to die and that it may be by murder. The writer intertwines, without losing the narrative rhythm, the last days of the protagonist's life with her childhood and youth years, cut short by a sudden maturity forced by a marriage of convenience, outlining the personality of someone who "was underestimated and little loved." A quiet girl, smarter than her family thinks, with an extreme sensitivity that makes her ill.
Maggie O'Farrell began writing the book in March 2020, without the possibility of traveling to Florence to enrich her story, although she took advantage of having lived near the Italian city years ago and had visited the Medici palace, albeit as a tourist: "I couldn't imagine that I would write this novel years later." The research to get closer to Lucrezia's life had to be based on reading and more reading, "I don't complain, I like it a lot, especially about Art History," but there was one piece that needed presence. She had never been to Ferrara, where the young protagonist has to move to live with her husband, a duke twice her age. She had studied the city from top to bottom with Google Maps, but something was missing: "I follow a strict rule: I don't write anything about a place I haven't visited before."
When the restrictions were lifted, Maggie O'Farrell was able to fly to Italy. She was in a palace in Ferrara and stood watching the sun stream through the window and dazzle her: "Nothing can substitute the experience. No matter how much Google Maps, that's why I was there." Although she was a little worried about traveling to the novel's settings with the text almost finished, fearing she had made a mistake, luckily she only had to make a few adjustments and add details. What surprised her was the emotional impact she felt walking through the places where Lucrezia, with whom she had been living for some time, had grown up and died: "It was much more moving."
"I try not to think too much about writing a historical novel," O'Farrell continues, paying attention to details but playing with fiction to make the story grow. She is interested in the "lives written with water" of people like Lucrezia, or William Shakespeare's son who inspired Hamnet (Libros del Asteroide), a worldwide success that has already sold more than 100,000 copies in Spanish. That is, untold stories, superficially known through the eyes of others. "I focus on the unexplained elements of history. We think we know everything about the Renaissance and Shakespeare, and that's not the case."
Asked if she is already writing something new, O'Farrell, gracefully, doesn't give anything away. She says yes, she is working on the first draft of her next book, but she is very superstitious and, when everything is so incipient, she doesn't even tell her husband what it's about.